


if i knew you'd say yes

by gracieminabox



Series: horizons universe [11]
Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Angst, M/M, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-31
Updated: 2017-08-31
Packaged: 2018-12-22 06:36:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11961762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gracieminabox/pseuds/gracieminabox
Summary: Jim and Phil have a couple of chats.





	if i knew you'd say yes

**Author's Note:**

> Note: This story takes place the day before the first scene of "driving with the brakes on" (if you want to know what happens in the immediate aftermath). It also, in turn, occurs partway through Chapter 15 in "the way our horizons meet."

Somewhere in his mind, Jim knew that he didn’t have a really good reason to be anxious. It’s not like advisors didn’t have dinner with their advisees on occasion, though admittedly, most advisees were not Very Special Cases and therefore their advisor’s only charge. It wouldn’t even be their first social engagement; he and Christopher Pike had had working lunches and dinners in Pike’s office and gone for after-work beers many times. Still, Jim had never been to Pike’s seventh-floor walkup on the nicer outer edges of the BOQ complex, and it was _that_ that had caused him a small amount of upheaval over the past few days concerning what to wear. Uniform? Dress uniform? Business casual? Tee shirt and jeans?

(Bones had just shaken his head with that fond, exasperated smirk on his face, called Jim a damned fool, and told him to pick up his laundry.)

Jim _had_ bitten the bullet and asked Captain Pike whether or not he should bring anything. Pike seemed to think for a second, a mysterious and slightly disconcerting twinkle in his eye, before answering. “Yeah,” he said. “Your roommate.”

Bones, who had no anxieties about meeting with Pike, simply informed Jim that he was on a seven-to-seven shift that day, and as such, _he_ planned to show up in scrubs, thank you very much.

Yet now, making his way up to the apartment, Jim was alone, having received a comm from Bones that he was stuck finishing up in the OR and would be there within the hour. Arriving at Pike’s front door, Jim took a moment to take a deep breath and smooth his hair, and then rang the chime for apartment 7C.

His parade rest stance was broken by confusion when the door opened.

“…Dr. Boyce?”

“Hey, Jim,” the doctor said congenially, stepping aside and letting Jim enter. “C’mon in.”

Jim smelled deliciously fragrant Mexican food as soon as the door opened. Boyce was in old, worn jeans and a blue sweater that Jim suspected was older than he was, with socks on but no shoes. It was an incongruous image for Jim, who had only ever seen Boyce in uniform before.

“Am…am I at the right apartment?” Jim asked cautiously.

“Yeah,” Boyce answered, disappearing back into the kitchen. “You want a beer?” he called.

Jim scratched the back of his head, still a little puzzled. “Uh…sure, yeah, thanks.” He paused. “Where’s Captain Pike?”

“I sent him to the store,” Boyce answered seamlessly. “The idiot only bought one jar of enchilada sauce for four people. I told him to get more when he went to the store yesterday, but did he listen to me? Of course not.”

Jim poked his head into the kitchen, trying to figure out how to phrase his question delicately, that not being one of his specialties. “Do…do you and Captain Pike live together?”

Boyce had a couple frosty longnecks in one hand and was stirring something on the stove with the other. “Not at the moment, no,” he answered, not looking up. “I’m just on head chef duty.”

“Oh,” Jim acknowledged dumbly. “For some reason, I just assumed he’d be the one cooking.”

Boyce snorted loudly and gave Jim a pitying glance. “So clearly spoken by someone who’s never tried to eat Chris’ cooking.” He walked over and handed one of the beers to Jim, gently ushering him toward the living room. “Make yourself at home. I’m just gonna check on the beans real quick.”

Jim didn’t exactly spend his idle hours musing about Pike’s decorating choices, but still found the apartment a little more… _homey?_ …than he’d anticipated. A large, comfy-looking green futon was the centerpiece of the room, flanked by two brushed-aluminum end tables and a pair of mildly battered but serviceable faux-leather armchairs. A floor-to-ceiling bookshelf was recessed into one wall, packed full to bursting with old-style paperback and hardcover books - Jim tried not to drool - and a large picture window looked out onto the Bay, a small collapsible telescope in a stand off to the side. A guitar stood unobtrusively on a stand in one corner of the room.

This place made Pike look like a person, rather than an institution, and Jim couldn’t help but smile a little at that.

Dotting the wall of the living room were holoimages. Pike’s office at the Academy was relatively free of personal memorabilia, his degrees aside; but he obviously put great stock into having pictures up around his home. Jim took the opportunity to browse them, and quickly noticed something interesting…

_Boyce is in a hell of a lot of these pictures._

Pike and Boyce, together, in old-style dress uniforms with flowers in their lapels. Pike and Boyce, together, with two women Jim didn’t recognize, outside some building on HQ grounds. Pike and Boyce, together, apparently a long time ago - Boyce was still brunet and Pike still golden blond - sitting on the steps of a house, smiling for the camera, Pike’s head on Boyce’s shoulder.

Pike had always described Boyce to Jim as his _best friend_ , but seeing this, Jim had to wonder. However, that observation was quickly overridden by the realization of how striking the young Christopher Pike had been.

“Wow,” he breathed.

“Wow what?” Boyce asked, approaching Jim from the side with a small smile.

Jim opened and closed his mouth a few times, flushing faintly pink, before giving a weak laugh and gesturing to the picture of them on the steps. “He, um…he was beautiful.”

Jim coughed, then took a swig of beer to quell the frankness of the statement. It’s not as though he hadn’t been aware of Pike’s objective attractiveness, but it had always been too far buried under several very thick layers of hero worship and what Jim refused to classify as filial affection for it to be of any consequence.

Boyce, on the other hand, just looked to the picture and smiled, and Jim could see a thousand colors and moods in the expression on his face. “Yeah, he _was_ beautiful,” Boyce said, before dropping his voice lower, softer. “He’s _still_ beautiful.”

Jim turned, and all of a sudden, it all clicked.

_Oh my god, he’s in love with him._

An ache of sympathy started in Jim’s chest.

“That was in Maine,” Boyce elaborated on the picture they were looking at. “At my parents’ summer house on the coast.”

“When?”

Boyce shrugged. “Twenty years ago, give or take.”

Jim’s eyes grew wide. “I didn’t realize you’d known him for that long.”

“We met his first year in the Academy.” Boyce moved on to another picture, the one with the two unknown women, and grinned. “That’s his promotion ceremony. When he got his captain’s stripe.”

Jim looked, smiling. “Who are the women?”

Boyce pointed to the dark-haired woman. “That’s Laura Zoss. She was Chris’ XO back then; now she commands the Lovell. You might’ve heard him refer to her as Number One.”

“Ohhh, _that’s_ Number One,” Jim said, looking more carefully. “He’s told me I could use her influence, whatever the hell that means. How’d she get that nickname, anyway?”

Boyce’s lips pursed as if he was restraining a laugh. “Chris would disembowel me if I told you that story, but I _beg_ you to ask him yourself, preferably when I’m there to watch.”

Jim raised an eyebrow and made an amused mental note, then gestured back to the picture. “And the other one?”

Boyce’s smile faltered somewhat, and he swallowed visibly. “That’s Becca,” he answered. “Chris’ then-girlfriend, now ex-wife.”

“He mentioned to me he’d been married a couple times.”

“Yeah, that was the second.” Boyce pointed to the picture of the pair of them in dress uniforms. “That picture’s from his first wedding, to Siobhan.”

“You were his best man,” Jim said quietly.

Boyce nodded, a little wistfully. “Yeah.”

Jim looked at Boyce in the present, and then in each of the pictures before them. At how he was looking at Pike. Soft, warm, profoundly affectionate even in exasperation, laced with just the barest hint of sadness. Jim could read the _if only_ in Boyce’s eyes plain as day, though he wouldn’t be able to see it if he hadn’t known to look for it.

“Look, Dr. Boyce - ”

“Phil, kid.”

“…Phil,” Jim corrected himself, “apropos of nothing, does he know how - ”

Jim abruptly stopped speaking as the apartment’s front door slid open and Chris Pike walked inside, similarly casually dressed and knocking Jim’s paradigms slightly askew.

“Your enchilada sauce, sir,” Pike said, handing the jar to Boyce. “Hey, Jim. Where’s your partner in crime?”

“Oh. Yeah, Bones is stuck in surgery. He said he’d be here in about an hour…thirty minutes ago.”

“Good.” Pike turned back to Boyce. “You need a hand in the kitchen?”

Boyce gave Pike a flat look. “From _you?”_

Pike and Boyce looked at each other, and Jim couldn’t help it - his breath caught in his throat just the tiniest bit at all that was visible there. Finally, Pike snorted softly and gave Boyce a conciliatory nod, then turned back to Jim, nodding down the hall. “C’mon down to my office,” he said. “I wanna show you some of the Enterprise’s specs before dinner.”

~

Bones showed up shortly thereafter, in his promised scrubs (clean ones, mercifully) and with a bottle of bourbon at his side - “I know you told Jim we didn’t have to bring anything, but I wasn’t raised that way.” He looked slightly haggard, raking a hand through his hair as he sank into his chair at the table, but he shot a tired grin Jim’s way while Boyce was dishing out enchiladas, and something in Jim’s solar plexus jumped. He tried to will the feeling away, but it didn’t work.

Dinner was surprisingly comfortable. Pike and Jim continued to talk about the problems the comp sci department was having with memory synchronization in the Enterprise’s computer; Bones and Boyce compared notes on a complex ER patient they’d jointly treated the previous day. Jim couldn’t help but notice how smoothly Pike and Boyce operated in one another’s space - everything was seamless, as if it had been choreographed. They were the kind of people who knew one another better than they knew themselves, and something as minor as handing off a serving bowl of rice still smacked of a relationship laced with trust and instinct and deep affection.

When they all got full of medical and command talk, the elder two started telling tales of the scrapes they’d been through together, everything from being jointly held hostage on an alien planet on Boyce’s birthday to Pike’s clever, if exasperated, negotiation to get Boyce out of an alien jail without their CO’s knowledge. Jim did, at one point, ask how Number One got her name.

Pike just looked at Boyce. “What have you been telling him?” he asked, his voice steady but dangerous.

Boyce held up his hands in mock surrender. “Not a damn thing.” He brought his beer to his lips, saying _sotto voce_ , “Lucky I didn’t tell him about Mexico.”

Jim and Bones raised their eyebrows in unison. “What happened in Mexico?”

Pike sighed. “God, I hate you.”

Boyce shot him a coy wink.

It was all very entertaining, but it also gripped Jim’s heart with this undefinable… _something_. To hear Pike and Boyce’s long, long history of having one another’s back made Jim long to be able to tell those same stories of him and his doctor to the next generation in thirty years’ time. At the same time, something about it hurt Jim’s heart terribly.

He didn’t want to look at Bones in thirty years with a pang of _if only_.

He didn’t know if he could _survive_ thirty years of _if only_.

He wanted with Bones what Pike had with Boyce, and he wanted with Bones everything Pike _didn’t_ have with Boyce. He wanted the shared stories, the living in one another’s back pockets, the instinctual understanding of how each other’s minds worked - and he also wanted the touches, the passion, the deep love that Boyce would so clearly give to Pike in an instant, if only he knew Pike would accept it.

Jim wanted to be able to love Bones to the fullest, deepest measure - and wanted Bones to love him back.

He just didn’t know if Bones would say yes.

~

Dishes done and stacked in the sterilizer, countertops wiped down, coats being tugged on, Jim pulled Boyce aside. A couple of beers had loosened his tongue and his inhibitions the slightest bit.

“Does he know?” he demanded inelegantly.

Boyce’s eyes widened just a little bit, and he shifted his body slightly, ensuring that they were out of earshot of Pike and Bones. “No, he doesn’t,” he answered, very quietly, “and I’m going to ask you, very sincerely, not to tell him.”

“I won’t,” Jim assured, “but why the hell don’t you?” Jim didn’t have the incontrovertible evidence for Pike’s feelings that he did for Boyce’s, but he was neither blind nor stupid, and he knew electricity when he saw it. “I mean, nobody could look at the two of you and deny the chemistry you have together. As a couple, you’d be an unstoppable force.”

Boyce looked down and shook his head slightly. When he looked back up at Jim, he looked tired, defeated, even older. “I don’t have a chance, Jim,” he said softly. “If I thought I did, believe me, I would’ve said something decades ago. But I don’t.” Boyce swallowed, then sighed, looking over at Pike’s profile as he talked with Bones.

“But don’t you see the way he looks at you?” Jim protested. “He doesn’t look at you like a friend. He doesn’t look at you like a brother. He looks at you like…like…”

“He’s not into men, and I had to accept that a long time ago.”

It was exactly the thought Jim had been avoiding in the back of his own mind, the one that was keeping him from making a move in his own version of this little melodrama. Bones might be entirely straight. Based on a few booze-fueled conversations, Jim was nearly certain that wasn’t the case, but post-divorce Bones was diligent about avoiding romantic entanglements of any stripe, regardless of gender. Admittedly, of all the potential reasons for him and Bones to not work as a couple, terminal heterosexuality was the least likely to affect their long-term friendship, and probably the least crushing to Jim on a personal level…but seeing Boyce now, feeling his own heart crack in two around Boyce’s defeated words, Jim questioned that assumption.

“How can you stand it?” he finally asked softly.

Boyce kept looking over at Pike, but now he smiled. “He’s my best friend in the universe, and I’m his,” he said softly. “I have no reason to complain. Not when I have that.”

“But doesn’t it hurt?” Jim couldn’t help but blurt, something leaving claw marks on his heart as he spoke. “To be so close so often for so long and not be able to touch? Doesn’t that kill you?”

Boyce looked back at Jim, his eyes a little glassy, resigned and sad. “Every day.”

A pause settled between the two of them, before Boyce spoke again. “Speaking of men who don’t look at each other like friends or brothers, you and Len are good together.”

Jim’s eyes shot up, a flush creeping over his cheeks that he tried to will away. Boyce’s expression was gentle, but knowing.

“I, um,” Jim began stiltedly. “I don’t know if I have a chance there, either.”

Boyce folded his arms loosely in front of him. “You’re both so damn young,” he mused quietly. _“What if_ is marginally better than _if only_ , but _I know_ is preferable to both. Don’t waste any more time wondering than you already have. Just tell him.”

“What if…what if it’s just like you and Pike?” Jim whispered.

“Then he’s still your best friend in the universe,” Boyce said. “And if you have that, you have everything you need, even if not everything you want.”

“Jim,” Bones called out, “you ready to go?”

Boyce clapped Jim on the shoulder. “Tell him,” he said again, as his parting words for the evening.

~

Two days later, Jim did.


End file.
